Environmental Inequalities Andrew Hurley

1
Environmental InequalitiesAndrew Hurley

• ISS 310, Section 3
• Spring 2002
• Tuesday, March 18
• Prof. Alan Rudy

2
Preface to Hurley

• The age of ecology is also the age of
  environmental inequality why isnt he surprised?
• The issue for him is more who benefited and who
  suffered from social changes in relations with
  the environment than the recovery of a pristine
  nature or previous ecological equilibrium
  state.

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Ch.1 Class, Race and the Shaping of the Urban
Landscape

• Tell me about his description of the Gary
  Products, Inc., chemical spill.
• What happened?
• How did people respond?
• How does he interpret that response?
• What is the importance of the structure of power
  relations in the production of the spill and
  responses to it?

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Normal Accidents, Environmental Dislocation and
Political Power

• For Gary Products, a manufacturer of cleaning
  solvents and antifreeze, the spill was a minor
  inconvenience, an expected cost of handling
  hazardous materials.
• For the afflicted population, the acid leak was
  one of many environmental mishaps that caused
  tremendous social dislocation and disruption,
  occasionally of tragic proportions.
• More striking, however, was the way in which the
  events of that April morning highlighted the
  hierarchy of environmental power in this
  manufacturing city. (2)

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Urban Landscape Uses

• While some have sought to control urban space
  for the purpose of accumulating profits, others
  have displayed more variegated motives, including
  habitation, recreation and the assertion of
  social status. (3)
• Historically, the ability to control others
  through the political process and through the
  dynamics of the capitalist marketplace gave
  certain groups a decisive advantage in the
  struggle to organize and manipulate the urban
  landscape. (3)

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Class, Ethnicity, Race and Urban
Landscapes/Environments

• Although commercial capitalism had driven a
  sizable wedge between haves and have-nots much
  earlier in the nation's history, the limited
  skill requirements of mechanized manufacturing
  rapidly expanded and defined the laboring class
  by creating a virtual army of interchangeable
  workers with little bargaining power. (3)
• The history of class relations is important in
  terms of the history of environmental relations
  because of the relations between class, race and
  environmental geography.
• With the slowing of European immigration after
  the outbreak of World War 1, manufacturers
  increasingly turned to African Americans to fill
  the lowest ranks of the industrial hierarchy,
  thereby adding a racial dimension to urban social
  arrangements. (4)

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Race, Class and Landscape

• 5 million African-Americans migrated to the north
  between 1919 and 1960, replacing European
  immigrants in the lowest rungs, and most
  dangerous and polluted areas, of the industrial
  division of labor (and urban neighborhoods).
• Further complicating the urban social structure
  was the emergence of a distinct white-collar
  middle class in the early-to-mid twentieth
  century. (4)
• The development of ethnically and racially
  divided industrial divisions of labor
  necessitated the development of a managerial
  class from the higher ethnic, racial and income
  ranks of the working class.

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The Middle Class and Landscape

• Whereas small proprietors had once set the
  standards of appropriate behavior and aspirations
  among these of the middling rank, salaried
  managerial employees working for large
  corporations and government institutions now
  defined middle-class values and styles according
  to their distinctive needs.
• Proprietors C-M-C Productive Ownership
• Tend to reinvest in their businesses
• Salaried Workers C-M-C w/o Prod. Ownership
• Tend to increase consumption
• In contrast to the business class, which
  championed an ethic of hard work and thrift,
  members of the white-collar middle class
  generally satisfied their social aspirations
  through participation in the expanding culture of
  consumption. (4-5)

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Class, Race and Landscape

• By the twentieth century, large-lot zoning and
  the liberal use of restrictive covenants in many
  cities ensured that elite neighborhoods would
  retain their white homogeneity....
• Working-class whites, on the other hand, relied
  on discriminatory real estate practices to
  separate themselves from racial minorities of
  comparable economic standing. (5)
• Residential separations and discrimination
  divisions of consumption.

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Class, Race and Safety, Health and Amenities

• Hurley argues that the power of industry was such
  that they were 1) able to obtain all the natural
  resources and industrial landscapes they desired,
  2) generate pretty much all the pollution that
  was cost effective, and (implicitly or
  explicitly) 3) control the courts and
  legislatures to maintain that power.
• He argues that this situation left the working
  class struggling within itself for relative
  workplace safety, environmental health and
  residential amenities all of which made
  race/class divisions worse.

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Struggles over Landscape-- from Hurley

• Immigrant Eastern Europeans in Chicago
• Poor African-Americans in East St. Louis
• Pennsylvania mill town workers
• Garys immigrant, Black and, later,
  Mexican-American worker-residents

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Post-WWII Pollution/Pollutants

• The post-war boom increased to volume of pre-war
  pollution (particularly in relation to
  depression-era reductions in production).
• Also The postwar boom in plastics chemicals,
  drugs, food additives, fabrics, and pesticides,
  for example, introduced a host of synthetic
  compounds into the environment. Many of these new
  chemical compounds, such as polychlorinated
  biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated biphenyls
  (PBBs), dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane (DDT),
  and Kepone, were later linked to serious medical
  disorders such as cancer, brain damage, and liver
  failure. (7)
• Many of these were more toxic and more stable
  than older pollutants making where one lived
  that much more important.

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Class, Race and Pollution

• The processes of economic growth and increased
  pollution generated greater class-based,
  union-style or civil rights focused struggle (for
  a piece of the pie) than it did
  environmentally-based struggle (for a more
  healthy work and residential environment) but
  that there was an increase in environmental and
  social health concerns.
• If you got your piece of the pie, you ought to
  earn a cleaner workplace and be able to buy a
  cleaner residence if you didnt you couldnt.

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Class, Race and Environmentalism

• Hurley also argues that the middle class culture
  of consumption meant that visible environmental
  concerns were about life outside of production --
  wilderness, parks, first nature -- rather than
  about industry, communities and second nature.
• This meant that those who could afford, and those
  who would be welcome and comfortable in
  wilderness and rural settings (white, middle
  class outdoorsmen and white rural hunters and
  fishermen) were the environmentalists.
• Although mainstream environmental activists
  claimed to represent the general public interest,
  we should probe carefully for any social biases
  in either the movement's popular base or its
  stated objectives.

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Class and the Aesthtic vs. Productive Consumption
of Environments

• The mainstream environmental movement spoke most
  directly to the needs and aspirations of white,
  affluent Americans focused in the aesthetic,
  athletic and reproductive consumption of
  landscapes rather than on the productive use of
  urban and rural land as a means for earning or
  maintaining a living.
• In fact, unions and civil rights activists were
  often (but not always) opposed environmentalists.
• The countervailing tendency, however, was the
  eventual development of the Clean Air Act and
  Clean Water Acts -- and Sierra Club-NAACP
  cooperation on highway construction.

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More countervailing instances

• Many African American leaders recognized that
  industrial pollution was a serious health hazard
  for blacks who lived in congested inner-city
  neighborhoods. Thus, when prominent African
  American leaders from across the nation convened
  in Gary in 1972 to chart a course for independent
  black politics, they included several planks
  about industrial pollution in their manifesto for
  change. (12)
• Efforts to improve occupational health and to
  equalize access to urban resources, although not
  considered part of the mainstream environmental
  agenda, nonetheless reflected the deep-seated
  concerns of workers and minorities about the
  quality of physical surroundings. Simply
  measuring commitment to environmental reform
  against a middle-class standard is inadequate.
  (12)

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Finally

• Because liberal doctrine Democratic and
  Republican held that economic growth was the
  most effective, and no doubt most convenient,
  route to social justice, policy makers at all
  levels of government tended to defer to private
  capital on important matters.
• Liberalism might broaden political representation
  and deploy public resources on behalf of social
  welfare, but it would neither disturb fundamental
  property rights nor intrude on the managerial
  prerogatives of industrial capitalists. (13)
• However regulatory, until these relations change
  nature and the poor will remain not only
  economically exploited and exhausted but
  environmentally so as well.